"We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example."
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William James quotes (page 24 of 36)
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"There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other."
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"Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late."
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"We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can. . . . The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work."
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"The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in."
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"The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely understandable world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account), we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong."
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"With mere good intentions hell is proverbially paved."
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"Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life."
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"... if we take the universe of 'fitting,' countless coats 'fit' backs, and countless boots 'fit' feet, on which they are not practically fitted; countless stones 'fit' gaps in walls into which no one seeks to fit them actually. In the same way countless opinions 'fit' realities, and countless truths are valid, tho no thinker ever thinks them."
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"We believe as much as we can. We would believe everything if we could."
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"Truth is what will be steadily borne out by subsequent experience"
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"The truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, "words, words, words," must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn."
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"Hogamus, higamous Man is polygamous Higamus, hogamous Woman monogamous."
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"A great idea goes through three stages on its way to acceptance: 1) it is dismissed as nonsense, 2) it is acknowledged as true, but insignificant, 3) finally, it is seen to be important, but not really anything new."
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"Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him."
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"[Religion is] the attempt to be in harmony with an unseen order of things."
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"In its broadest term, religion says that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in rightful relations to it."
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"Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins"
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"How many of us persist in a precipitate course which, but for a moment of heedlessness we might never have entered upon, simply because we hate to change our minds."
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"We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly - the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape."
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